Continental Breakfast
by flotsam-junk
Summary: Q can't remember the mission, the objective, or any of the circumstances regarding the room he woke up in, but if the copious amounts of pain and the sounds of Bond throwing bodies like frisbees on the other end of his radio are any indication, then it can't be anything worse than the usual misfortune.


A/N: Back to doing my favorite things to my favorite people: meaning hurting Q and making Bond willing to shank anyone to tries to stop him from helping. This is really just large helpings of hurt/comfort, but it DOES include BAMF!Q (because he will NEVER be totally helpless) and Protective!Bond (because there's a heart under all those scars). I really love hearing from you guys, so if you enjoy this, comments mean a lot to me - have fun~xoxo

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Q woke groggily, his limbs heavy and his eyes dry, giving an involuntary moan at the rubbish sleep he was now trying to haul himself out of.

The first thing that struck him when he finally managed to peel his crusted eyelids open was how absurdly _dusty_ his room was. He had always been so careful to take immaculate care of his flat due to all the precious and ridiculously expensive technology it housed within its 900 square feet – but the curtains of specks and mites wafting through the air gave a different testament to his housekeeping abilities.

He turned over onto his side to glance at his alarm clock, and instead of red numbers was met with a wall of solid stone. He frowned, confused, and the sensation of cold brick began to seep up his shoulder – another painful reminder that he was NOT in his pajamas, but rather in his field clothes, which were currently whispering hints of being ripped and torn.

Q found himself at a rare loss for words. Slowly, he dragged himself into a sitting position, almost doubling over instantly again as his shoulders and back screamed in protest. At the same time, a bullet of pain rammed through his skill, and he wrapped his arms around himself protectively. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his throbbing forehead against them, biting back another groan and trying to stave off the waves of bewilderment now washing over him.

After a moment, he lifted his head once more, determined now to get some answers, and began to take in his surroundings. Gray, stone, cold, small, and square drifted lazily to the front of his mind, but he found it difficult to connect the thoughts as to what it all _meant_. He gave his head a slight shake, coughing at the ingestion of dust, and felt yet another new pang stabbing at his throat – which he was convinced was now coated with all the dust that _wasn't_ on the outside of his body.

His legs, cramped and cold (and bleeding somewhere, he was sure of), were absolutely not ready to take on the weight of his slight frame, so he stretched his arms out and began painstakingly dragging himself across the floor. His elbows dug into the ground, leaving behind trails in the layer of dust coating the surface, and as his eyes adjusted to the view from below, a solitary object took form in the immediate distance. Q squinted his eyes and reached his hand out, touching something solid and sturdy: a table leg. His eyes followed it up – the surface seeming impossibly high – and saw something just barely hanging off the edge: a wire.

In a moment of sudden clarity, Q threw himself onto his knees, ignoring the cracks and burns, and thrust his hand onto a splintered surface, eventually finding a small, half-smashed bud: Q's personal earpiece – or rather, what was left of it. Memories of dark tunnels and the white noise of a radio buzzed through his ears, the burst of sudden familiarity warming him. He held it close to his chest and sunk back to the floor, feeling his energy leave him as rapidly as it had come, and hit the shell of the "Send" button.

Static.

More static.

Then….

"…Q?"

Q groaned in response. "Good morning, 007. Coffee, black, two sugars please."

Bond gave a tinny chuckle on the other side, and Q could hear the sounds of muffled distress briefly in the background. "And where shall I be delivering room service to this fine morning?" came his silken reply as something heavy fell in the distance.

Q smiled and closed his eyes again, feeling a flood of exhaustion overtake him as the corners of the room darkened again. Bond was…looking for information, yes? Information, regarding….sensitive data. Q struggled to recall any kind of mission manifesto, his attempt at coherency slowly being overtaken as images of sausage platters and cups of tea danced behind his eyelids. His head began plunging into the abstraction of dreams.

"Q!"

The sharpness next to his ear made him jump as his eyes shot open. He was lying down once more, his hand by his ear and still clutching the shattered earpiece. Daggers twirled behind his head and when he wrenched his eyes open, the room seemed even more obscured with darkness than before.

"007" he replied, attempting to match Bond's urgency but barely managing to whisper instead.

"Where are you Q? I can't deliver the full continental without knowing where you're staying." The words were humorous, but there was a definite sharpness to them that hadn't been there before. Q struggled to command his brain into action, and he could almost feel the cogs trying to whir in response.

He looked around once more, a tingle of desperation just beginning to pervade the haze. What had they been searching for? "I…..don't know. Small room. Ssss-stone, door in llll-eft hand corner. Terrrrr-ible 'commodations really" he slurred, the words congealing in his mouth.

"Can you see any light? What direction does the door open?"

Q clutched the bud to his chest again and used his free arm to drag himself a few more feet across the room. The door, heavy and gray to match the stone interior, had no visible hinges. Q gave a groan of both pain and frustration, and threw his eyes to the ceiling which was – unsurprisingly – stone. Was this the Renaissance? What year was he in? The thought was only half a joke, as Q could barely remember his comfortably intricate and reassuring line of coding passwords at the moment. His head panged uncontrollably, and he gave a few hard blinks in a vain attempt to clear it. As his eyes reopened, he noticed a slight flurry of movement in the dust above. He reached his hand out fuzzily as he tilted his head in confusion. Then it hit him.

"Bond" he said with as much punctuality as he could muster. "There's air flow above me. There must be something drawing it out, so follow the pipes and look for a heavy gray door."

"Copy that" came the curt response. "Hold on Q. Don't fall asleep."

"Wouldn't dream of it" Q muttered despite his brain doing exactly that. He forced himself to sit up and went to rub the exposed spot on his knee where the stone had jabbed at, but felt it slip away as though oily. He pulled it from his torn pants and scarlet glowed in his darkened vision, a sudden flash of memory assaulting his head – something cold and hard had plunged into his leg just above his knee earlier. The realization of pain made his sore back proclaim even louder, and the discomfort was positively dizzying. He took in unsteady breaths and fell sideways back to the floor, drawing his legs in and feeling the rough stone grind against his temples.

He dragged the headset to his lips. "It was a knife" he said gravely.

There was a pause on the other end. "What was a knife?"

For a moment Q couldn't speak.

"Q?"

Then, "They used a blade. Three-and-a-half inches, foldable, curved with an imprint of an 'S' on the handle. It went in above my right knee" his voice shook on the last word.

There were sounds of a scuffle, and when Bond's voice returned it was slightly out-of-breath. "Are you hurt anywhere else, Q?"

Vague flashes of violent imagery bubbled to his mind, and it took Q a few moments to place them in the proper folders in his head and label them as recent personal experiences. He nodded, then remembered Bond wasn't _actually_ there with him. "Injured back. There are welts…I think I was bound, at some point. Shoulder is wonky. Neck is bruised. Let's just say if it's helping hold my head up, it's damaged at the current moment" he finished, struggling not to think about where this onslaught of injuries had actually come from. He remembered something coarse around his neck, and the vague sensation of something being wrenched from the side of his head. His mind flashed back to the mission he barely knew he was on, and he prayed to anything that could piece together his disjointed thoughts that no one had gotten killed for his blunders. His frayed mind wasn't ready to handle that yet.

"Nearly there, Q" Bond responded reassuringly.

Q gave a croak of laughter as panic began to rise from the pit of his stomach. "I shouldn't be s-so surprised you d-double-Os can't keep up when your 'spotted' Quartermaster isn't there to-"

A door slammed open and Q shut his eyes in alarm. His hand wrapped tighter around the earbud, his only source of familiarity, and nausea spiraled down from his head directly to his stomach. He readied himself to be thrown against a wall - or into an Iron Maiden, at the rate he was going – but the hands that reached down for him were alarmingly gentle.

"-to wave us off into the battlefield?" came Bond's rich voice, and Q could've laughed had his throat not been scraped like a pumpkin.

Q placed his fist, still clutching the broken bud, over Bond's hand on his shoulder, as Bond placed his other hand on the underside of Q's back and slowly, slowly, lifted him into a sitting position against the wall. Q's head fell like dead weight, and Bond cupped his neck protectively.

"The only spots I see on you now, Quartermaster, are the spots of trouble you've gotten yourself into."

Q gave a weak snort. "There's not enough Benzoyl Peroxide in the world to clear the marks of MI6 from my complexion."

"I'm more concerned about the sprained shoulder and 4-inch gash in your knee" Bond replied, to which Q groaned in agreement.

A brief silence fell, and Q felt the minutes pass into hours. His head lolled and pain danced in the form of flashes of light behind his eyes, and days later Bond's hand was cupping his cheek, shaking him gently.

"Q – hey. I turn my back for half a second to take off my gloves and you're already falling asleep on me."

"What can I say, you didn't even bring the bloody coffee" Q mumbled, his words bumping into each other like marbles.

Bond chuckled, his hand still on Q's cheek, his other hand going to his knee, and Q felt shards of knives travel up his leg at the contact. He shuddered, and Bond rubbed his shoulder apologetically. "This may hurt" he said softly, and Q could just manage a single nod of permission.

Working quickly and efficiently, Bond set about yanking scraps of gauze out of strange pockets in his vest and constricting them tightly around Q's knee. Q stayed eerily still, his head hanging limply and his hand still clutching the headset.

Bond finished up and tapped Q's cheek with his finger. "Q. I need to look you over to make sure you can travel. I have no radio communication down here and we need to leave quickly."

Q lifted his head fractionally and stared blearily at Bond. "All that work into developing a handprinted gun, when I could have been making a telepathic helmet."

Bond smirked. "They already have something similar for compromised Quartermasters – it's called bubble wrap" and oh, Q would have had his smug face for that if he hadn't felt so ill at the moment.

Instead Q was silent, contenting himself with focusing on the (rather blurry) movements of Bond's hands as they traveled about his injuries. They ghosted over his hurt shoulder and gently pried Q's back away from the wall, where his fingers rode the grooves of welts lining his entire backside.

"Jesus" Bond whispered to himself, eyes narrowing in something like anger. His fingers glided to Q's neck, trailing up the side of his throat as he inspected two blobs of deep purple on either side.

Q would have liked to remark about how proud he was of his decoy skills – having proved to be a sufficiently distracting punching bag – but the nausea was growing and opening his mouth would've resulted in either words or bile. And Q was never one to gamble with the unstable numbers of probability.

After running his hands through Q's hair to check for open head wounds – his fingers lingering affectionately – Bond deemed his inspection complete, and moved to the side of Q's uninjured shoulder to slide it across his own. "Time to go. They only serve breakfast til 9" he said, easing Q off the wall and onto his feet.

Once upright, the sickness hit him full force, and Q couldn't suppress a gag that nearly knocked the wind out of him. Bond placed a heavy hand on Q's chest, encouraging Q to put as much of his weight as he could into Bond's side. "I can't give you any medicine yet as I don't know what they drugged you with. I assume you wouldn't want to choke down a tablet anyways" he added, and Q closed his eyes and nodded slowly.

"Not like you to swap out your hand grenades for bottles of aspirin" Q noted as they made slow progress out of the room.

The corner of Bond's mouth quirked. "I may not hole myself up in R&D like Her Majesty's gopher, but I do at least know a Recovery mission when I'm given one."

Q hummed. "And did your bubble wrap deliver the parcel safely home?" He inquired, barely even knowing what kind of information they had set out to recover in the first place.

"That still remains to be seen. Currently he's crawling through an abandoned sewer way, using a Double-O as a walking stick."

At that, Q's eyes widened, and he stumbled as he lost his footing. His hand gripped Bond's arm icily. "Recovery…" he slurred out, and he shot Bond an expression of unadulterated confusion.

Bond met his gaze, his eyes peculiar. "That's right….recovery. Q, you do realize you're what we're recovering, yes?"

Q dug his nails further into Bond's sleeve. "What…?" he choked out, more desperate than ever to fit the missing pieces together.

They stopped, and Bond readjusted so Q was leaning even more heavily on him. "You've been missing for 5 days, pet" Bond said, his voice low and delicate.

"Missing…?" Q repeated dumbly, finally understanding why he couldn't remember the mission objective or who he had been assigned to or what they were even after in the first place. The word rang through his head like a bell, echoing off every lobe in his brain, and more disjointed images of dark corners, shadowy silhouettes, and coarse towels soaked in something putrid flew through his vision. His heart thumped in his throat and his teeth began to chatter. Bond removed his arm and turned to face Q directly, who was rocking back and forth ever so slightly.

Bond met Q's gaze and grasped his temples, his disheveled black hair poking up in between Bond's fingers. " _Recovered_ " he emphasized. "Don't let's think any more of it until we at least get somewhere where the smell has improved" he said, tilting his head in a slight grin. Q closed his eyes and nodded slowly, and Bond placed a hand to his forehead, sweeping his wild hair away for a brief moment. Q leaned into the touch.

The heavy pad of footsteps clattered behind Bond, and every hair on the nape of his neck stood on end as the clack of a gun being cocked reverberated off the walls. An eternal half-second granted Bond just enough time to decide to dive for the pistol on his belt, but the second he turned, a crack of thunder roared through the tunnels and raced each other in echoes.

 _No_ Bond thought vehemently, lamenting that injustice should take him now.

Arms still outstretched in mid-action, Bond stood waiting for the sensation of pain telling him he was too late; it took him a good few seconds to realize that it wasn't coming.

He snapped his head around and, indeed, saw a hunchbacked, but still-upright man, standing before him, arm stuck straight out and wielding a pistol at eye length. Bond stared, agape, at how still the oaf was standing, before realizing that a dark circle of red was expanding across the length of his torso. The man choked and sputtered before falling to his knees, gun flying out of his hand as his body pummeled the concrete.

He turned at once to Q, alarm and confusion heightening his senses, and saw a staggering, but clear-eyed Q, holding Bond's pistol just beneath Bond's outstretched arms. Q met his shocked gaze with a lopsided grin.

"Manually-set frequency" he said hoarsely, pointing to the broken earbud he had returned to his ear. "I heard him coming from a _literal_ mile away."

Bond's eyes lit with amusement, as Q offered his gun back to him. Bond returned it to his holster, then grabbed Q's hands and pressed them silently to his lips in gratitude. Q's knees shook unsteadily, the throwback of the gun having disrupted his careful equilibrium, and Bond caught him as his balance failed, Q's weight falling against Bond's and his head drifting into the crook of Bond's arm.

Bond tightened his arm around Q, his other hand carding through his hair, as Q leaned against Bond's sternum and closed his eyes in exhaustion. Feeling his strength leave him, Bond left Q to slumber, linking his arm under Q's knees and hauling him off the ground. As Bond made their way through the newly-silent tunnels, Bond lifted his eyes to the surface, where, 15 feet above them, radios blared, helicopters whirred, and sirens sang a song of safety.


End file.
